Mark Morrison

I was definitely on my tenth cup of coffee by now, hands shaking like crazy. Nobody could blame me for being on edge. I’d been stuck in this forsaken Arctic tomb freezer for the last six months, the only corner of Earth that humans hadn’t completely screwed over—yet.

Staring at my computer screen, the Dimensional Collider’s startup sequence scrolled by in perfect little lines, all neat and orderly. Everything looked great on the surface. Everything was completely fucked underneath.

The electrical connections were off. I’d run the numbers so many times. I’d taken all my calculations to Dr. Brennan and showed him exactly where this would go wrong and how we were about to murder what was remaining of our species. He’d give it flying fucks and I finally understood why they’d chosen me for this moment. I was the scapegoat.

When everything went to hell, they needed someone to blame. Someone expendable. The lowest guy on the ladder, the kid from the ruins who should be grateful to be here.

They’d set me up perfectly. The final switch. The last person in the chain. When the Dimensional Collider tore reality apart, it would be Mark Morrison who’d pulled the trigger.

“Cold feet, Morrison,” he’d said with that condescending smile. “Perfectly normal before we make history.”

History? The word tasted like bile. That’s what they were calling this disaster waiting to happen. The salvation of humanity. The answer to all our problems after the resource wars had left the world looking like a burnt-out hellscape.

Four major nations had collapsed into one desperate alliance called the Resistance Nations, and they needed this project to work. They had to prove to everyone left alive that their shiny new government could actually deliver on its promises.

Me? I was nobody. A ghost born from the war’s dying breath, trained to patch the holes in a world that was already bleeding out. They’d started me on the Dome projects, designing electrical systems for humanity’s last safe havens. Then someone decided I belonged here, in this frozen hole, maintaining the machine that would finish what the wars had started.

Too bad it was going to kill us instead.

“Starting final countdown,” the AI announced. Its tone was calibrated for comfort. The AI was Dr. Brennan’s son’s invention. Some ten-year-old kid, if you could believe that. Word around the facility was that the kid had been born with computer-like hands. Except geniuses stopped being born a long time ago, and if there were any left, I was sure as fuck shouldn’t be doing this. Everyone laughed when I said it. “All systems nominal. Dimensional Collider ready for activation.”

Through the thick glass in front of us, the Dimensional Collider sat like a giant metal donut. The thing was huge, probably three stories tall and just as wide. It looked like someone had taken a CT scanner and pumped it full of steroids. Metal rings stacked inside each other, all humming with power that made my teeth ache even through the protective barrier.

We were safe up here in the control room, but down there in that white chamber, the air itself looked ready to catch fire.

My fingers rested on the keyboard. I could stop this. One command sequence, and the whole thing would shut down. But then what? Court martial? A firing squad? In a world where every scrap of energy meant the difference between life and death, sabotaging humanity’s last hope would be treason of the highest order.

“Getting nervous, Mark?” James called from beside me. His grin was as hollow as his eyes. We’d been mistaken for each other so many times over the past six months that some people had given up trying to tell us apart. Same age, same dark hair, same stubborn jawline. The stress had even aged us the same way, carving identical lines around our eyes. But he kept smiling. We all kept pretending.

Six months of bunking next to each other had taught me that James talked in his sleep, always about home, always about the people he was trying to save.

I’d stopped telling him about my nightmares where the Collider ate up my whole home back in New Chicago. James had volunteered for this assignment. Actually requested it. His sister had died in the Philadelphia food riots, and he believed this project would prevent more cities from falling.

We’d started as strangers who happened to look alike. Now we were something harder to define. Not quite friends, because friends would have been honest with each other. Not enemies, because we both knew we were trapped in the same nightmare.

Sweat was dripping down my face despite the fact that we kept this place colder than a morgue. The Collider’s core was going to generate so much heat when it fired up that they’d had to build the entire facility in the most frozen, desolate place they could find. Maybe it was the isolation getting to me. Six months of nothing but white landscape and artificial lighting. Maybe the cold was messing with my head.

Yet, the numbers didn’t lie. The cascade failure was as clear as day.

“No,” I said, meeting James’s eyes. “We’re about to screw this up royally, and you know it.”

His grin died. The pretense cracked, revealing the terror underneath. “The readings look perfect,” James said, but his hands were shaking as he adjusted his console settings. “This is going to work, Mark. This is going to save everyone.”

I looked around the control room. Hundreds of people packed in here. Scientists, engineers, military brass, and government officials. All watching. All waiting.

“Sixty seconds to dimensional breach,” the AI said.

My hand moved to the activation key. The room went quiet except for the hum of machinery and people whispering prayers under their breath. Everyone knew we were about to witness either humanity’s greatest triumph or its final fuckup.

I closed my eyes and thought about Sarah, my girlfriend back in New Chicago. About the letter I’d written but never had the guts to send, the one where I’d planned to ask her to marry me when this assignment was over. I thought about the kids we might have had, the life we could have built in whatever world came after this moment.

“Mark,” James whispered. “It’s time.”

I opened my eyes and looked at the screen one last time. The electrical pathways were pulsing in these beautiful, perfect patterns that would hold for exactly 3.7 seconds after activation before everything went to shit.

“Ten seconds,” the AI said.

I found the key.

“Five… four… three… two…”

I’m sorry, I thought, and pressed down.

The core erupted with the sound of God’s own scream. Electromagnetic fields crackled and hissed as they locked into their final configuration. Energy arced through the superconducting rings in brilliant displays that burned afterimages into my vision. The air itself became electricity, every molecule charged with power that made my skin crawl.

“Core temperature rising, all within normal range,” someone shouted. “Electromagnetic containment holding steady.”

Success after success rolled across the displays. Dimensional barriers were weakening. Parallel frequencies detected. A perfect match. Another universe, another Earth, rich with geothermal energy waiting to be harvested. Everything humanity needed to survive.

Then the portal opened.

The light was so bright it felt like staring into the sun before the smog took over the sky. I found myself smiling through the tears streaming down my face.

“Holy shit, we’d actually done it,” I mumbled.

Against all odds, despite every fear I’d had, we’d actually pulled it off.

James slapped my back, shouting something I couldn’t hear over the roar. Other voices joined in, the whole control room erupting in celebration. Dr. Brennan was probably already planning his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

And yet, through all the blinding light and chaos, I caught sight of my computer screen.

The calculations were updating in real time. Energy output. Dimensional stability. Cascade probability.

My blood went cold.

3.7 seconds. Exactly like I’d predicted.

The portal began to convulse. Warning lights painted every console in hellish red. The electromagnetic containment wasn’t failing—something was pushing back from the other side. Something that didn’t appreciate visitors.

Nausea clawed up my throat like acid. I’d warned them. I’d shown them the math. None of it mattered now. I bolted from my chair so fast that it crashed into the console behind me. James turned, his celebration dying as he saw the horror written across my face.

“Mark!” James screamed after me. “Mark, what the—”

The room exploded into panic as everyone else saw their screens. Dr. Brennan was bellowing orders over the growing chaos. Scientists scrambled to abort the sequence. The cascade had already begun, and physics doesn’t accept apologies.

I slammed into the security door and pressed my keycard to the scanner. Nothing. Red lights. The lockdown protocols had been activated. I was sealed inside with everyone else, trapped with the disaster I’d helped create.

On the other side of the reinforced glass, a soldier stood guard. I’d seen him around during the briefings and the cafeteria. Tall, blonde, and packed with muscle. The kind of guy who made me feel like a soft desk jockey, even though I wasn’t exactly small myself. We’d arrived at the facility around the same time and gone through orientation together. I never caught his name.

Shit, I was so bad with names.

He’d tried to start conversations a few times during our first weeks here. Normal stuff—where I was from, what I thought about the project, and whether I wanted to grab a drink after the shift.

I’d shut him down every time. It wasn’t that I disliked him. Under normal circumstances, I might have been interested.

The guy was attractive, and I’d been with men before. I could tell he was looking for more than conversation, and I wasn’t in the headspace for hookups or whatever he had in mind. Not when I was spending every sleepless night trying to find some way to prove myself wrong about the coming disaster. James was different.

James was my bunkmate, which meant I couldn’t avoid him. Somehow, that accidental intimacy had worn down my defenses. The soldier had stopped trying to connect with me after the third week. He only nodded when we passed in the halls. But I’d caught him watching me sometimes, like he was trying to figure out what made me tick. And now he was my last hope.

“We need to run,” I said, not caring if he could lip-read. “We need to get the fuck out of here!”

The pure terror on my face must have been pretty obvious as I pressed against the glass, mouthing the words he couldn’t possibly hear over the growing roar of the portal going haywire.

Behind me, the light was getting brighter and angrier. Something was coming through that portal. Something that definitely wasn’t the geothermal energy we’d been expecting.

The soldier didn’t waste time asking questions. He looked at me, then through the glass at the absolute chaos happening behind me. His eyes met mine, and whatever he saw in them was enough. He didn’t hesitate. His keycard beeped once before the heavy door bolts disengaged with a solid thud.

The second the seal broke, a wall of sound hit us. It was the sound of reality tearing itself apart, a high-pitched scream tangled with the groan of dying machinery and the frantic blare of every alarm in the facility. The soldier hauled me through the opening so fast my feet stumbled. The door slammed behind us, its locking mechanism hissing as it sealed the control room. Sealed our colleagues inside.

“Move,” he ordered. We ran.

We ran through the emergency exit route, boots pounding against metal grating. The corridors were in chaos. Soldiers, engineers, and scientists who’d been stationed outside the main room were sprinting between computer terminals lining the laboratory walls, frantically trying to execute manual shutdown procedures on the core. Their faces were pale with desperation, fingers flying over keyboards.

I knew what they were doing wouldn’t stop what was coming.

“How long until that thing blows?” the soldier shouted over the blaring alarms as we rounded a corner.

“Three minutes, maybe less!” I yelled back, my voice cracking.

His face went grim. “We won’t have time to reach the surface. There’s a reinforced bunker two levels down. It might hold.”

We changed direction, following emergency signs toward the shelter. Other people had the same idea. A handful of survivors were crowding through the heavy bunker door when we arrived. The soldier and I were the last ones to make it.

“Wait!” the soldier screamed as they started to seal the entrance. “Wait for us!”

We dove through as the massive door began to close. The locks engaged with a series of mechanical thuds that sounded like a coffin being nailed shut.

Seconds later, the explosion hit.

It felt like being torn apart from the inside. The bunker shook so violently I thought my bones would shatter. Everyone was on the floor, holding their heads, screaming. The sound wasn’t noise. It was reality itself breaking apart, waves of dimensional energy cascading through everything.

The soldier tried to reach me, but failed the first few times; the shaking was too violent. Even though we were only feet apart, it felt impossible. Finally, he managed to throw himself over me, trying to shield me from whatever was happening above us.

The waves kept coming. I lost track of time. Minutes, hours, I couldn’t tell.

When the shaking finally stopped, nobody moved for a long time. We all lay there in the dark, listening to our own breathing, waiting for the next wave to hit. The soldier was still covering me, his weight heavy and warm. I could feel his heart hammering against his ribs.

“Is it over?” someone whispered in the darkness.

Nobody answered because nobody knew. The emergency lighting kicked in about ten minutes later, bathing everything in infernal red. That’s when we saw the damage. Hairline cracks spider-webbed across the concrete walls. Water was seeping through the ceiling in three different places. The air tasted like metal and fear. I counted the people. Twelve of us. Out of hundreds.

Everyone lay there breathing hard, trying to process what had happened. Then a woman near the door started screaming. She ran toward the exit, pounding on the metal.

“Open it! Open the door! We have to get out!”

Some of the soldiers caught in here with us tried to calm her down. The soldier stood up from where he’d been crouching beside me.

“Don’t open it,” I said weakly from the floor. “We don’t know what’s out there.”

As if responding to my words, a screen on the bunker wall flickered to life. Green text scrolled across it: RADIATION LEVELS SAFE. EXIT CLEARANCE APPROVED.

“Wait,” I grabbed the soldier’s arm before he could step toward the opening. He moved to a wall panel I hadn’t noticed before and pulled out two respirator masks.

“Radiation might be clear, but we don’t know what we’re gonna see out there,” he said. He handed me one of the masks, the rubber and plastic feeling heavy in my hands. “The air’s still toxic shit, and after what just happened…” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.

I strapped the mask over my face, the seal tight against my skin. The soldier did the same, both of us preparing for whatever was left. Through the clear plastic, his eyes looked as scared as I felt.

“Ready?” he asked, his words muffled by the respirator.

I nodded, knowing that nothing could really prepare us for what we might find. Or what might be gone forever.

The door began to open with a mechanical whir.

At first, the light was too bright. It shouldn’t have been possible since we were supposed to be underground. The soldier and I squinted, throwing our arms up to protect our eyes.

When our vision finally adjusted, we saw what was left. At first, my brain couldn’t process it. I kept looking around, expecting to see something familiar, anything that proved this place had existed.

Nothing.

The soldier took a few steps forward, then stopped. “Where’s the facility?”

I wanted to tell him it was right here, right where we were standing. There was nothing here except snow. Pristine, untouched snow that looked like it had been falling for centuries.

“It’s gone,” I said, my words barely audible through the respirator. “It’s all gone.”

That’s when it hit me. James was dead. Everyone up there was dead.

We had to climb over the snow drifts to get our bearings. My legs felt like water, and the soldier had to help me up the slope. When we reached what should have been the facility’s center, I saw it.

A giant, shimmering oval hung in the air, maybe fifty feet above where the core had been.

“What is that thing?” the soldier asked.

“A dimensional fracture,” I said. “A permanent wound where we broke reality.”

Help was already coming. Helicopters appeared on the horizon, rescue teams dispatched to assess the disaster.

This was my fault. I was the one who’d pressed the button. James had believed until the very end. He’d died thinking we were saving everyone, never knowing we’d doomed them instead.

I turned to the soldier, the only person who’d seen what really happened. The only witness to my cowardice.

“My name is James,” I lied. “James Tanner.”

The world would remember the name Mark Morrison as the one who doomed us all. But Mark Morrison was already gone.

The soldier looked at me, and I could see in his eyes that he understood exactly what I was trying to do.

“James Tanner,” he echoed, like he was testing how the name sounded. Then he paused, studying my face. “There’s a place you can go. Is there anything left for you back there? Anyone waiting?”

I thought about Sarah, about the letter I’d never sent, about the life that was already over the moment I’d pressed that button. “No,” I said. “There’s nothing left.”

The soldier nodded slowly. “If you ever feel lost, if you need somewhere to go, ask for Eden. Just Eden. Someone will know what you mean.”